New Zealand won the Lockdown World Cup at its inaugural event, crushing all opposition. So successful were we, the ‘team of five million’, that we find ourselves, post-match, confined to the locker room, still in our briefs, and unable to progress with the bigger game called Life.
The captain has had to stop bragging about it too, as she’s botched more than just the next fixture.
The recent COVID-19 border breaches amount to a Herculean display of incompetence. That more than 60 per cent of staff working at our borders went untested this long can only really be contemplated over a sharp intake of breath between clenched teeth.
In other jurisdictions and in more reasoned times such intransigency and inaction would lead to resignations. But Ardern has set the bar so low for so long that an obliging populace has grown used to this level of ‘performance’, polished up by spin.
In light of recent developments, we cannot entirely blame the conspiracy theorists for asking the question that is on everyone’s lips: at what point does ‘managed’ incompetence become so culturally entrenched that it constitutes a conspiracy?
Conspiracy theories must abound, as the PM has cautioned us in recent comments from the throne, about ‘listen[ing] to the experts’.
“If you’re someone who views politicians suspiciously, then please, by all means, listen to the independent doctors, scientists – those who are our source of advice that we lean on,” Ardern said last Thursday.
“… experts like Dr Bloomfield, they’re the ones who really know and understand this virus and are trusted sources of information,” she said, leaning hard on Dr Bloomfield.
Gerry Brownlee has been forced to backtrack on comments he made about the curious COVID timeline of recent days, saying he is “not at all comfortable” that he might have aided conspiracy theorists by asking whether the Government was covering up information about the recent outbreak.
The Opposition is now on the back foot, scared that contradictory messaging might endanger people, when it’s the Government itself that has endangered people, our nation and our economy.
The National Party’s position seems to be that, come the election, we should change the captain but carry on playing the same game. Lockdowns will continue.
Why? The ‘established science’ over lockdowns is by no means settled, as countries such as Sweden and Taiwan have proven. States in the US which locked down hard fared no better than those with fewer restrictions.
Sunetra Gupta, who is Neil Ferguson’s opposite at Oxford University, is calling for a Plan B – comprising alternative measures. Gupta believes that large parts of the UK have already achieved herd immunity through exposure to the virus.
It is slowly starting to dawn on people that they might have been misinformed about the strategy for COVID: that it can’t be ‘eliminated’ and that it isn’t going to go away.
There has never been a fully effective vaccine for influenza. Why would we suddenly expect a ‘silver bullet’ vaccine for COVID-19?
As the ‘crisis’ simmers away, not only is the national debt mountain growing but Adrian Orr, the Reserve Bank governor, is quietly printing vast sums of money which will, in real terms, significantly devalue the purchasing power of the New Zealand Dollar.
Economists are now beginning to warn of ‘global deflation’, with China showing deflationary signs at its factory gates. Quantitative easing is failing to gain traction. Inflationary stimulus is largely absent.
The economies of the developed world really are ‘in this together’ because they are all following the same ‘operating procedure’ in international policy’s global play-book. So too are they agreed on paying a large percentage of the population to remain unemployed while we ‘fight’ the virus. Unemployment looks set to snowball.
New Zealand follows this play-book because it is heavily invested in supra-national organisations like the United Nations, which some see as a precursor to one-world governance.
An interesting feature not just of Ardern, but of many recent ‘world leaders’, is their relative youth and inexperience. One could include in this not only Blair and Cameron, but also Varadkar, Macron and Trudeau (Junior). Gone are the days of experienced elder statesmen, steeped in the traditions of business and international diplomacy, steering their respective countries as independent vessels.
The twenty-first century political ‘leader’ is, in reality, a middle-manager. Ardern could never hope to be more than that. In whose service is she really?
Ardern’s policy programme comes not from learned experience or loyalty to country, but straight out of the UN’s Agenda 2030. The United Nations is her spiritual home.
John Key was similarly ‘internationalist’, and it was National’s Murray McCully who signed us up for the UN’s Global Compact which encompasses ‘internationally proclaimed human rights’, an international and freely-moving labour force, ‘a precautionary approach to environmental challenges’ (defined self-referentially by the UN itself), and anti-corruption measures (which are ironic coming from an organisation which is morally bankrupt).
Our government’s COVID response comes directly from the largely-discredited World Health Organisation, an offshoot of the UN, whose head, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus is a revolutionary Marxist-Leninist with strong links to China.
President Trump has stopped funding the WHO. He has also referred, in recent comments, to New Zealand’s surge in COVID-19 cases. Washington correspondent Simon Marks said Trump almost appeared to be implying that New Zealand had deliberately tried to control the virus in a bid to show him up.
This is possibly true, given Ardern’s smug approach and willingness to embrace any and every leftist cause.
It won’t be us having the last laugh when other parts of the world are back on their feet, while we remain incarcerated in ‘Prison Ship Aotearoa’.
There most definitely is not, as Chris Hipkins asserted, somewhat menacingly, this week, “a single source of truth”. Rather, there are various options – some of them better than others. The real conspiracy is that this government is withholding them from the public debate.
One can only hope that National wakes up to this and is prepared to look at alternatives to lockdowns. History tells us they probably won’t.
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